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Introduction
In the new millennium, leading business organizations have been capturing data about people, turning it into actionable information, and using it for making better decisions. Successful business leaders have been using talent data and insights to drive organizational success by unlocking the power of their people. This paper is one in a five-part series that explores your role as a business leader in driving talent management functions and the specific tools and approaches that will make you successful. The focus in this installment is hiring and onboarding. Other papers in this series address learning and development, performance and compensation, and succession and talent mobility.
When business leaders or recruiters need to fill a role, they almost always start with external candidates, even though internal employees are a fantastic source of talent. Existing employees know the culture, the business, and the people. In fact, studies show that internally hired leaders reach competence in a new role 50 percent faster than external hires. So why dont business leaders hire from within more often? A big part of the problem is that most companies dont maintain robust talent profiles of their employees and, among those that do, even fewer expose this information to business leaders. Ideally, business leaders should have clear visibility into the talents of candidates as well as employees so they can fish for talent in a deeper and wider pool. This, in turn, can reduce time to hire and improve quality of hire. In other words, when armed with the right talent data and insights, business leaders can make better talent decisions.
Talent Matching
Although visibility is key, its unrealistic to think that a manager has time to sort through hundreds or thousands of employee talent profiles and candidate rsums to find the right fit. Talent matching tools and decision support features are critical for line-of-business leaders. Matching technologies can bring the top five candidates who meet specific criteria to the surface. The criteria should include the degree of match with existing top performers on your team. You already know what success looks like. Talent solutions should help you find candidates who look like your top performers and should then reveal the best matches to help you make better decisions faster.
Tapping Employee Networks
Another strategy that can help you find the best candidates, ones like your top performers, faster is to tap into your employee networks. Research by analyst Rob Cross has shown that top performers are disproportionately connected to other top performers. Solutions that easily enable employees to promote openings across their networks can lead to better-quality hires who are a better fit for highperforming cultures.
Most new team members expect to receive initial training of one kind or another. A talent solution that gives your new hires visibility into which initial training their peers found most helpfuland whywill get them engaged and productive sooner. Moreover, if you have insight into this information, you can spend more of your own time and energy on the new hire development that decreases time to proficiency, turning typical new hire disorientation and disengagement into an opportunity for growth and mastery.
Enabling New Hires to Join the Conversation
Looking beyond formal training, new hires benefit just as muchif not morefrom participating in the informal learning that occurs every day in the business. Talent solutions that recognize this fact and provide access to the ongoing activity stream of the teamthe shared links and insights, the kudos for a job well done, the questions being askedwill integrate your new hires much faster and more effectively than merely inviting them to a traditional welcome meeting.
Aberdeen Group, Onboarding 2011: The Path to Productivity, aberdeen.com/aberdeenlibrary/6923/RA-onboarding-talent-acquisition.aspx, February 28, 2011.
Decrease the Number of New Hires Who Quit Within the First Year
Few aspects of leading a business are as frustrating as investing time and energy to get the hiring process working well, only to see new hires not hitting the ground running, growing disengaged, and quickly leaving. Such a cycle of constant backfilling can be debilitating to your business. As a business leader, you can greatly decrease the chances of a quick quit with a greater focus on talent data to support better talent decisions.
Prehire Data Is New Hire Data
Prehire data from the recruiting process should flow directly into a new hires talent profile with as little rekeying of information as possible. More importantly, this data must then be exposed and leveraged by the larger organization. One of the unsung benefits of new hires is the diversity they bringdiversity in perspective, job history, skills, competencies, and expertise. Tapping this new talent data leads to better decisions, and it also validates and affirms the value of new hires to the company, increasing their engagement and connection to the company. This historic talent data also provides more information to you as a business leader, better enabling you to deploy your new talent against initiatives that are well suited to their unique experience and expertise. Most managers do this quite poorly. Less than 50 percent of managers can correctly identify the talent that would add the most value to specific initiatives. With access to better data, you can outperform the norm and drive better business results.
Integration into the Organizational Network
You can make meaningful onboarding happens by building connections in the employees new organizational network. Doing so can be challenging in todays world of virtual teams and remote workers. When new hires are able to review the talent profiles of their teammates and other colleagues, they make connections with those who have shared skills, roles, interests, or hobbies. Better connections increase stickiness to the organization and reduce turnover rates. As a leader, you can also facilitate these kinds of connections by actively introducing new hires to others in the organization. In some cases, these introductions might be about connecting new hires to old salt and quasi-mentor types of relationships. In other cases, introductions should be less obviously work-related and more about connecting with peers who have similar personal interests. Studies have shown that organizational networks that form around non-work-related topics provide a crucial back channel for information sharing and collaboration. In your role as a business leader, access to morerobust talent data can help you more quickly weave your new hires into the fabric of your business, resulting in fewer quick quits and reduced times to competence.
Performance Management and Development Start with Hiring and Onboarding
Employee performance management and development actually start at the new hire and onboarding phase. To gain a new hires buy-in and commitment, you need to clearly articulate the role the employee will play in the organization and how that persons personal goals align with managements
and the overall organizations objectives. You need to encourage an understanding of the related formal and informal learning opportunities that will help a new hire achieve personal goals. Smart leaders will also begin employee development during the onboarding process, because even the best hires should continually focus on self-improvement and career planning. Most business leaders understand these needs at some level. Whats often missing is formal management support for these points of alignment and development. Talent systems can simplify this alignment process and the subsequent tracking process, by offering clear visibility into cascading goals and related learning activities. Such solutions enable business leaders to focus on goal and development alignment from the outset, without forcing them to sacrifice time they spend managing the rest of the team. Once again, the key to more-efficient, more-effective decision-making is the availability of talent data and talent insights, including cascading goals, specific goals for other members of the team, specific development and career plans for employees in similar roles, identified gaps in the new hires current competencies, and that persons near-term career aspirations.
Conclusion
With ever-shorter business cycles and a growing awareness of the value of talent to business success, business leaders are driving more core HR functions than ever. Study after study validates that this closer alignment drives performance, profit, and shareholder returns while also fueling the careers of talent-focused leaders. The availability and quality of talent intelligenceemployee data, insights, and decision support toolsis the key enabler of business-led talent management. Business leaders are important stakeholders in decisions regarding talent management and have a vested interest in the related software solutions. Given your increasing role in critical talent management functions, its only natural that you have more say in selecting solutions that address real business needs. Only a solution that provides real talent intelligence enables the insight you require in order to overcome the hiring and onboarding challenges you face.
The New Business of Business Leaders: Hiring and Onboarding June 2012 Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 oracle.com
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